Can a vacant hospital be healed?

In two years, Birmingham could have two vacant hospitals just six miles apart – and they both have uncertain futures for redevelopment.

The relocation of Trinity Medical Center to the unfinished digital hospital, recently named Grandview Medical Center, on U.S. 280 in early 2016 could leave its current facility on Montclair Road empty.

And it will join the long-vacant former Carraway hospital in Norwood that closed five years ago and has struggled to find a new tenant.

So what is the fate of empty hospitals?

We talk to health care real estate experts about what future the hospital properties can expect and to local experts about potential for each property in this special report.

If a developer wants to bring another health care operation to a vacant hospital, the neighborhood the facility is in needs to have the market demand for whichever health care services are being proposed. If a developer wants to bring non-health care services, he or she needs to assume the likelihood of spending additional money to re-purpose the building.

Former hospitals, however, are better fitted for health care services because they already have the necessary infrastructure in place, said Carl Gedeon, a Cleveland-based managing director for MSA Management Cos. LLC, a firm specializing in the development of diagnostic imaging centers.

“Medical services would be the primary type to go there because you understand that it was a hospital at one time,” he said.

Carraway’s future?

In Birmingham, the Trinity and Carraway campuses are almost two different tales, one real estate broker said.

Located several blocks north of Interstate 20 between Carraway Boulevard and 25th Street North, Carraway closed in 2008 after operating for nearly a century.

In 2011, the Lovelady Center, a nonprofit women and children’s center, bought the Carraway property for $6 million as part of plans to renovate it into a new headquarters. Those renovation plans fell through, however, when the city decided against rezoning the property.

While still unsure about the kind of future developments coming to the Trinity campus, Brown said the facility will latch onto the development expected to occur around Montclair Road.

“In a nutshell, we see a lot of positives in that area,” he said. “It’s a completely different situation than other hospitals.”

Brown said he’s currently involved in the pending sale of a 144,000-square-foot professional office building on Trinity’s campus that the hospital doesn’t own. He said the sale, expected to close at the end of August, is a deal “that bodes really well for the future and redevelopment of that entire campus.”

While not disclosing specifics, Brown said the professional office building is expected to house a mixture of medical and general office functions. He also said some of the doctor groups operating on Trinity campus don’t have plans to follow the hospital during the relocation.

“I’ve talked to some who have definitely said it’s not an automatic,” Brown said.

The addition of Tapestry Park and other smaller developments around Montclair Road is “re-enforcement that the area is vibrant and a place for businesses to look at,” Brown said.

Trinity CEO Keith Granger said more details on the future of the campus will be released in 2014 when the hospital will begin marketing its current site.

“We are not only going to be out marketing this site, but reaching out to a number of groups to determine their interest level and possible uses for this site,” he said. “There are a number of avenues we would want to reach out to and touch for possible uses of this site, whether it be single users or multiple users.”

“Generally, any discussion at this stage has been very preliminary and very exploratory,” he said.

Granger said he also doesn’t want to disrupt Trinity’s current operations, which will remain on Montclair for another two years. What has pleased hospital leaders, he said, is the economic development activities occurring around the hospital campus.

“How is this going to be different than the Carraway site?” Granger said. “I think this is a very vibrant location with good traffic flow and other commercial activity, as evidenced by the Tapestry apartment complex.”